Table of Contents
The core business of jBPM is the ability to persist the execution of a process. A situation in which this feature is extremely useful is the management of tasks and tasklists for people. jBPM allows to specify a piece of software describing an overall process which can have wait states for human tasks.
Tasks are part of the process definition and they define how task instances must be created and assigned during process executions.
Tasks can be defined in task-nodes and in the
process-definition. The most common way is to define
one or more tasks in a task-node.
In that case the task-node represents a task to be
done by the user and the process execution should wait until the actor
completes the task. When the actor completes the task, process execution
should continue. When more tasks are specified in a
task-node, the default behaviour is to wait for all the
tasks to complete.
Tasks can also be specified on the process-definition.
Tasks specified on the process definition can be looked up by name and
referenced from within task-nodes or used from
inside actions. In fact, all tasks (also in task-nodes) that are given a
name can be looked up by name in the process-definition.
Task names must be unique in the whole process definition. Tasks
can be given a priority. This priority will be used
as the initial priority for each task instance that is created for this task.
TaskInstances can change this initial priority afterwards.